For this project Miguel Ángel Tornero strongly resumes the photographic drift as a starting point and as a practice that keeps us aware of what’s going on. T In addition to new research and influenced by other daily practices such as photogrammetry or 3D home scanning with the mobile device itself, the information and images collected are once again the raw material for an elaboration in which, increasingly, they demand greater volume and corporeality. Those images that want a skeleton are no longer satisfied with being printed, they prefer to become an object.
When entering the exhibition, different scenarios, carefully constructed, follow one another taking over the space and the narrative. Both directly on the floor and on worktables that serve as pedestals, we find printed, die-cut and assembled aluminum that show elements taken from the city. Ecosystems halfway between still life, collage, sculpture or diorama, which take us to a time in between limits (material, mental, temporal) where, as happens when venturing into new worlds, it is uncertain whether they represent an absurdity or an ideal.
And yet, this exhibition is nothing more than a contradiction. It means embracing technological advances but rebelling against their tyranny. To value the manual but to resort to industrial machines. To consider the abandonment of the city once its trap has been discovered, but at the same time to preserve the fascination of the romanticized idea of the city. To pursue the search for the essential (or at least for some kind of truth) through a premeditated construction of false appearances. A fallacious still life that does not hide its gears.
The hands, the manual, the manipulation… indicate that not only the sense of sight is necessary here, while symbolizing the duality involved in the city as a construction. They are an essential tool in the process, but a machine has replicated their gesture on a larger scale. The hand as creator, from above, also crowns Manojo, the main work that also reminds us of a claw machine that attracts us with the bait of a prize within our reach that, in the end, slips.
Visiting flea markets, we have learned the power of juxtaposition; how accumulation and contamination make things more powerful, mysterious and attractive, enriching and multiplying their meanings. Things is also the title of that book by Georges Perec -a story from the sixties that retains all its relevance and interest- in which its dissatisfied protagonists hope that, precisely, things will change or someday will be theirs. In our context, it may be nothing more than an object with yellowed leaves that we find one Sunday at the flea market, coexisting in a stall with a hundred other things: a Casio organ, a stuffed bird, a mannequin with a wig, an incomplete silver cutlery, some Castilian shoes, a Nokia 3310, a Space Age lamp, some leather mittens, El Corte Inglés bag, some white blade skates, some a clanging cymbal…
It is hard to believe that certain elements, today decadent classics, were a symbol of modernity. Like us, they used to be cool, and today they could even be perceived as an icon of resistance. In any case, one still recognizes an enjoyment and the artist’s need to live by watching, even if the structures of the tragicomedy seem more and more precarious and the plot agonizes. Everything has become dispensable, precarious and less surprising, starting with ourselves; yet (or precisely because of this) we still cannot look away. The city, still.
Against the noisy background, Miguel Ángel Tornero resorts to his instinct. He dissects, mixes, analyzes and recomposes what has been seen in a mechanism where the game calms the rumor and allows us to regain control, understanding that what we give power to are, simply, things. And that is the final contradiction: that what occupies us here is not what is truly important.
Miguel Ángel Tornero (Baeza, 1978) has been artist in residence at Spanish Academy in Rome or Künstlerhaus Bethanien Berlín and awarded with important prizes as for example Enaire, Grünenthal, Purificación García, ABC, Generaciones and the National Prize to the Best Art Book. His work at collections such as Fundación Mapfre or Banco de España.
Las cosas (bodegón falaz)
September 12 – November 8, 2024
Miguel Ángel Tornero
Galería Juan Silió
C/ Dr. Fourquet, 20, 28012. Madrid.
Opening hours:
Tuesday – Friday,
11am – 7pm.
Saturday,
11am – 2pm.